Welcome to Flagler College and the Proctor Library!
As a new (or returning) student of the college you will find that the library is important to your success in classes. Happily, the librarians want to assist you in using the library collections and services, so please do not feel you cannot ask us for help.
We know for some of you our library is very different from your libraries at home. We hope you find this guide helpful.
You can come to the Ask Here desk to talk to a librarian anytime Monday-Friday between 9am and 10pm during the fall and spring semesters. We are also here on Saturday's from 10am to 5pm, and Sunday's from 2pm to 10pm. For non-semester hours, please consult the library's hours or contact us via phone or email.
| Reference: Librarians are specially trained to help you find information to write papers, but we are happy to answer any question you may have. |  |
| Circulation: Circulation managers check books out to you, and retrieve materials professors have put on reserve for specific classes. NOTE: Your library card is your student ID card. |  |
| Instruction: Doing research for papers is more than a search in Google. Some professors will invite librarians to teach a library instruction session. |  |
| Inter-Library Loan: The Proctor Library does not have everything ever written. . . unfortunately. Our ILL staff works to get books and articles that you might need from other libraries in the United States. You need to submit a request using the Inter-Library Loan form. |  |
| Reserves: Professors sometimes do not require you to buy everything you need to read during the semester. Instead, they put one or two copies of an item on reserve in the library. Some General Education Textbooks are available for limited check-out periods from reserves. | |
| Checking In/Out Books, etc.: The Proctor Library is what is known as an "open-stacks library." This means you can browse the collection and choose the books you want. All the books on the second floor can be checked out for 3 weeks and taken home. Ask a librarian on-duty for more information. |  |
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Computer Labs: There are two areas with computers on the first floor, and several classrooms of computers on the third floor. The classrooms on the third floor are only available when classes are not being taught, but all other areas are open to use.
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| Scan Station: If you need to save or email a document, the library has two scanners that allow you to make an electronic copy of your document and save it to a USB drive, to Google docs, or send it directly to your email or Smartphone. |  |
| Watching Movies: Some of the materials on reserve are movies. These are usually available for 2 hour check-out, and the student or circulation manager on-duty can tell you where our TV's and DVD players are located. We also have about 2,000 DVD's that you can check out to watch at your house or in your dorm room. |  |
You need a "library card" to check books out of the library. At Flagler College, your student ID serves as your library card.
You will also need your ID if you plan to use the Library after 6pm Monday through Friday, and all day on the weekend. The Library is "card access only" during these times to prevent non- Flagler people from entering the building.
Books in the library are organized by Library of Congress Call Numbers. You need to know the call number for a book, and the collection it is in, in order to successfully find the book in the libary. The maps above show you were collections in the library are located.
Let us say you are interested in reading Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. After going to the library's homepage, http://library.flagler.edu/, and clicking on "Books," you do a title search for Tom Sawyer.
Browse through the results you get after hitting the search button, and choose the book you want:
Each of the letters stands for a subject. To find out what subjects each letter stands for go to the Library of Congress Classification Outline.
We are looking at PS1306 .A1 1977. And if we consult the Classification Ouline, P stands for Languages and Literatures. If we scroll down through the list of P's, we see that the S stands for American Literature.
Someone somewhere decided that 1306 is one of the numbers connected to books written by Mark Twain.
A1 is something called a Cutter number named after a man whose last name was Cutter. He created a system where you take the first letter of a book's title or author's last name, and then assign numbers to the other letters. A certain set of letters are associated with each number 1-9.
The last number in the call number is sometimes there, sometimes not, but when it is, that is the publication date.
The last book in the Tom Sawyer list is an e-book. More than half of our book collection is available online through EBSCO e-books. To access these books you need to click on the first line of the record to see the full record.
Once you are looking at the full record you will see in the center of the page a link that takes you to the e-book homepage:
Once you click the link you can either look at the PDF version or you can choose to download the book to your personal device.
Articles refer to journal articles, magazine articles, or newspaper articles.
Journal articles = normally these are what are called "scholarly," "peer-reviewed," "referred," "scientific," or "academic" articles. Basically, good sources for your paper. Journals are normally published 2 to 4 times a year.
Magazine articles = these are less academic and more popular reading materials, and are normally published either weekly or monthly.
Newspapers articles = shorter writings than the other two, these appear in daily or weekly newspapers, and most towns will have at least one newspaper published and distributed to the paying public.
Some of our articles can be found in the print collection on the first floor in the "Current Periodicals" section [periodicals are a word for journals, magazines, and newspapers that are "periodically" printed and "circulated" to the paying public], but most are found online under "Articles and Databases" on the Library's homepage, http://library.flagler.edu/. [Database is a term for online websites that libraries pay for that provide bulk access to many, many journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. This makes it cheaper for libraries to provide access to as much good information as possible.]
Searching the databases for articles is similar to searching for books.